


Small Mercy

by kuiiper



Series: Street Kids, Refugees, Rats, and Assassins [1]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, The Whalers are Daud's Kids, and Daud Loves Them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:08:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28585488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuiiper/pseuds/kuiiper
Summary: When Daud fall backwards onto a floor already slick with his own blood, his whalers weren’t there to catch him.Corvo spared Daud's life. What about the Whalers?
Relationships: Daud & The Outsider (Dishonored), Daud & The Whalers (Dishonored)
Series: Street Kids, Refugees, Rats, and Assassins [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2094561
Comments: 3
Kudos: 41





	Small Mercy

When Daud fall backwards onto a floor already slick with his own blood, his whalers weren’t there to catch him. He collapsed with eyes shut tight, limp against the dilapidated wall. He didn’t humiliate himself with an attempt to clamber to his feet. No, men like him didn’t deserve the mercy of looking weak. He would give Corvo what he’d fought for. He’d won.

  
He opened his eyes. It was the least he could do, really, to look him in the eyes as he killed him. He could let the Royal Protector watch his life drain, just as he was made watch his Empress. To his surprise, no pain came yet. 

  
_Oh, right,_ Daud thought. _An eye for an eye._

  
Of course Corvo would wait to slaughter him after the evil Daud had done. He would draw it out. At least, that’s what Daud himself would do. To have his entire world destroyed, his life ripped from his pleading hands, and then kill someone quickly was mercy lost to him. Inflicting a pain like that which he had been given was much more reasonable. Daud scarcely realized that words were coming out of his mouth. His voice trembled imperceptibly. 

  
“I have one more surprise for you,” he breathed, “I ask for my life.” The eyes of the masked felon stared unfeeling into Daud’s. "When I killed your Empress and took her daughter, something broke inside me.” 

  
That was true at least on a broad scale. Daud wouldn’t pity himself with mention of the hours spent trying to scrub the blood of a monarch off his palms. It hadn’t been /something/ that had broken in him so much as /everything/. 

  
So maybe Daud was scared. So maybe, for the first time in his life, the Knife of Dunwall had been bested, beaten, and moreover, absolutely destroyed by something he’d done. So maybe it was like he’d woken up after a life dead to the world. 

  
Daud wanted to try living again. 

  
He made that much clear in the way he all but begged for mercy, for the last thing he could take from Corvo. His revenge. 

  
Corvo’s sword flexed in his grip. He shook his head. His free hand- the left one, the one bearing the Mark- raised two fingers and brought them close together. Then, he brought his middle finger to his palm and let his ring finger crook with it. 

  
_No small mercy._

  
He didn’t give him the grace of blinking away. Instead, Corvo turned sharply, like Daud was no more than a corpse, perhaps, and simply proceeded to walk in the opposite direction. 

  
“And you choose mercy,” Daud croaked. “Extraordinary.”

  
He blinked as far away as he could from the scene and found himself in the upper levels of his chambers, just barely managing to clamber through the window. 

  
His whalers would never let him hear the end of this, he knew. His heart winced at the thought. They would be worried. 

  
He tried to persuade them not to care about him, and had tried to convince himself that they didn’t anyway, but it was obvious. The way they were so quick to defend him, or to follow orders. It was a strange love language, that of street children and outcasts and criminals, but it was love nevertheless. The bastards had nearly burned down the non-waterlogged regions of the Flooded District trying to piece together how to make a cake for him. For his birthday. He’d never told any of them his birthday, but somehow, they’d come to the (wildly wrong) conclusion it was the fifth day of the Month of Rain. They forced him into a celebration which he sat meekly through, if only to humor their efforts. But then again, he could have also been trying to hide the sudden redness of his eyes. 

  
Oh, and how they’d /scold/ him. It was like they thought /they/ were in charge with how they tried to reprimand him for being reckless in things that affected no one but himself. He’d never put a whaler in any more danger than he thought that they could handle. The hinges on his door were damn well close to being rendered absolutely useless with the number of times Thomas (often with Billie at his side and Rulfio at their heels) kicked it open and invited themselves inside his chambers to “check on him”, by which he meant yell at him until he convinced them he wasn’t dying. 

  
He didn’t plan to leave them yet. 

  
A rough bark of a laugh escaped Daud. He truly, truly, would never hear the end of this one. He clutched his bleeding abdomen with one hand and gripped the railing with the other while he limped down. 

  
“Need help in here,” he wheezed as he reached the bottom of the stairs then added louder, “get your asses in here, dammit!” 

  
There was no response save for the sound of a rat or two scuttling within the broken walls. 

  
“Thomas,” Daud forced out. He’d been here a handful of minutes before Corvo made his appearance. “Thomas, wherever you’re hiding you’d better get your ass over here and- agh-” his legs gave way from beneath him and he only barely managed to catch himself with his hands on the ground. Heavy pants wracked his body. Outsider’s stupid fucking eyes, this wasn’t working. If he managed to die like this, he would have deserved the torture instead. 

  
“Rulfio!” He shouted, facing the ground. Blood dripped from his nose. “Rinaldo! Dammit, Galia!” 

  
The silence ached. 

  
Daud rest his forehead on the floor as he slowly began to collapse in on himself, let himself rest. Someone would find him eventually on their patrol. Besides, his whalers could hardly go twenty minutes without at least one of them running in. The new girl, Lydia, had proven fond of rushing inside with shells in her hands and dumping them in front of him for him to appraise.   
(His new seashell collection was located on the bookshelf beside his bed.) 

  
As he slumped over, he turned his head to the side to cool his cheek on the cold ground. A whaling mask stared back at him. 

  
Thomas’s body (Daud knew it was Thomas: he’d recognize the scrawny, broad-shouldered kid anywhere, masked or not. He could recognize all of his whalers he’d known longer than a week) rested gently beside him. 

  
There wasn’t time for any profanity to leave Daud’s mouth because he was too busy forcing himself up to his knees with burning muscles. Viciously trembling hands unfold the body beside him from where it laid crumpled. He yanked back the hood and fumbled with the buckle securing the mask to Thomas’s face. Sweet brown eyes were shut most of the way, but not entirely. They were unseeing regardless. 

  
“No,” Daud said, adrenaline numbing him, and he stood. “Someone get in here!” He shouted. “Someone get Marinus- we- Thomas is hurt, someone-” 

  
He stumbled outside his office. Two more bodies rested as if tossed haphazardly onto one another.

  
There had been no mercy involved in what Corvo had done. Hurt his kids and let him go free. Tears stung his eyes and he shook both of the whalers’ bodies beside him. Neither blessed him with a response. 

  
And so, Daud continued like that. He limped as fast as his wounds would let him, maybe even faster. He passed Lydia and Istrus in one of the classrooms- both incapacitated- and onto Fisher in the library and Galia in the foyer.

  
The trail of blood leading from Daud’s office throughout the building stopped before each fallen whaler. The tears in his eyes painted his cheeks and made his vision go static. He didn’t want the mercy extended onto him anymore. 

  
Daud shuffled slowly back into his office. All of the others, at least, had fallen with someone else nearby. Company in death, he supposed. Thomas had been alone. He would be his company.   
He laid on his back beside the boy’s body, staring up at the craters in the roof. 

  
The Outsider was laughing at him somewhere, he could feel it. He hoped his whalers were giving the eerie bastard hell. He’d be there with them soon enough.

  
_”It’s weird to think,” Thomas said, years ago, “that something like that actually exists. I mean, it’s weird, right? It’s not just... this. There’s more to it.”_

  
_Daud had grunted in response._

  
_“It’s not something anyone can just deny. We’re proof. I look at the marks of the arcane bond in the mirror and I just, I just- there’s this thrill that goes through me. Like, it’s electric. Knowing you’ve been touched, even just by... extension, by the Outsider.”_

  
_“The Outsider is a bastard. If he ever touches you, wash your damn hands.”_

  
_“And so are you! But we like you around here well enough. I just meant that... you know the bone charm? The one I found on the beach right after I arrived?” Thomas touched the twine tied around his neck and pulled out a delicately pulsing lump of hideously carved bone. “I don’t want anyone else to know. I don’t know what this one does. But it... makes me feel good. Even if it’s not doing anything for me, it’s a reminder. That I’m... something. I’m here, with you guys, and I, I guess, I... I have a family. You know?”_

  
When Daud wheezed, blood was hissed from his lips. He pushed himself up on his forearms. One last thing to do, he supposed. If that bastard Attano had taken Thomas’s bone charm he’d get up right now and personally hunt him down to get it back. To his relief, as he reached to tug the collar of the jacket to the side, he found the hideous twine string to still be intact. He lightly pulled out the bone charm from where it was hidden beneath his shirt and let it rest there on Thomas’s chest. It was less something for Thomas’s wellbeing and more for Daud’s. If it had made a renegade orphan feel like he had a family, well, maybe Daud could feel something like it, too. 

  
And that’s when he spotted it. 

  
Just in the meat of Thomas’s shoulder, there was a small, sharpened vial with bolt fittings on either end. 

  
Thomas stirred, and the sleep dart fell from him. He made a disgruntled sound like he was just waking up from a relatively unpleasant nap. Puppy dog brown eyes opened. 

  
Daud started crying for real when Thomas sat up in a rush, roused quickly by the sight of blood on his leader’s face. 

  
“Void! Sir- what-” 

  
Galia, sword drawn, burst through the office doors. She didn’t wear her mask, and there was /murder/ in her eyes. 

  
“Who the hell let that masked bastard in here!” She hissed, and then froze when she saw where the puddle of blood led to. 

  
Behind her, the rest of the whalers, brushing off the now-hollowed sleep darts embedded within them, rushed in. They pushed each other a little, trying to get a better look at what happened first. One of them blinked in front of another and they both toppled. 

  
When Daud snorted, it didn’t seem like anyone else had taken the sound for laughter, because the room when silent. 

  
“Dammit,” he breathed out, letting his head fall back. His eyes fell upon the smoggy Dunwall sky. “Damn it all. Can one of you degenerates- get- get the-” 

  
His kids were safe. Every last one of them. He let the agony of his injuries rush back in now that he didn’t have them to worry about. His mind went blank. 

  
In the flashes of whatever happened next, Daud registered only a few things. Marinus barging in with whiskey in hand and proceeding to dump it on the deepest region of his wound was what primarily stuck out since it sobered him with the pain. That roused him enough to see the worried faces of his whalers staring. Some of them perched on the railing of the second floor to get a better look. 

  
The next flash involved opening his eyes from a bout of unconsciousness to see Thomas glaring at him /hard/. He was kneeling, and he leaned over Marinus’s shoulder as the doctor worked, but really, it looked like he intended to kill him as soon as he was done getting brought back from the brink of death. 

  
Daud had the presence of mind to lift his hand up and reach up just enough to ruffle Thomas’s hair before slipping away again. 

  
When he woke up the next time, there was no pain. Only the light golden glow of the fog of the void.

  
“Damn,” he groaned, throwing an arm over his face. He’d hoped to avoid this, if at all possible. But of course, the Outsider had other plans. 

  
He heard him before he saw him. “Daud,” the Outsider said coolly, “what a pleasure seeing you here.” Daud felt a shift in the air of the void around him, and he looked up to find the god leaning over him. “How are you feeling?”

  
“Like shit. What do you want?”

  
“To say hello.”

  
“Like hell that’s it. What do you want, really?”

  
The Outsider laughed softly, and the sound echoed delicately through the space- or lack thereof- that they were in. “Ever so quaint, Daud. I just wanted to check up on you after you encounter with our lovely Royal Protector.” 

  
Daud grunted as he sat up. “I’m fine, thanks. It would have been nice if you’d have kept him from stabbing me if he was just going to let me live.”

  
The Outsider smiled. “I don’t like to intervene,” he said dismissively, “besides. If I’d stopped him, would you have known when to stop? If you were in his shoes-” 

  
“Yeah, yeah. I know that-”

  
“-you would have killed him. I know these things, Daud.” 

  
The Outsider vanished and reappeared sitting at Daud’s side, knees tucked up to his chest. He stared out into the void with him. A lamppost drifted slowly by. The Outsider giggled. 

  
“And that’s why you like him more than me.”  


“I don’t like to have favorites, Daud.”

  
“But you do anyway.”

  
“It’s nothing against you, you know. It’s simply that Corvo is... well. He is the only one to have not used the powers I’ve given him for death. Not a single man, woman, or child has died by his hands. He’s unlike any other person bearing my Mark.” 

  
“Then maybe stop giving powers to murderers, if you want less murders happening.” Daud desperately hoped his cigarettes had made it into the void with him, and he made a triumphant grunt when he found them in his pocket and shoved one between his lips. 

  
Without asking, the Outsider waved his hand, and smoke began billowing from the end of the cigarette. Daud nodded once in thanks. 

  
“But then, the stakes wouldn’t be so high. I Marked a little boy once, a little boy of middle class and with nothing inherently special about him. He hasn’t done an interesting thing in his life. He uses his transversal to sneak into the theater without paying, you know. And that’s the extent of it.” That earned a laugh from Daud. “And, I’ll have you know, you’ve piqued my interest again.”

“By letting your toy nearly kill me?”

  
“Ah ah, you didn’t let him do anything. He beat you fairly. I merely meant that by what you told him.” Daud looked away, but the Outsider continued. “Or was that, too, a lie? Do you truly intend to leave for a softer life?” 

  
Daud chewed the end of his cigarette. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m tired.”

  
“You will be more so once you’ve left the Void. Tell me.”

  
“I... I do. I want to leave. Didn’t lie to Attano. But I’m not sure I can.”

  
“Why?”

  
“The whalers. Spent so long raising them up to be... murderers, and then longer showing them how to make it profitable. None of them have anywhere to go.” 

  
“Mhm. Go on.”

  
“They’d be lost without me.”

  
“Indeed they would be. They respect you, no matter what word reaches you.”   
Daud nodded slowly, and didn’t respond. 

  
The Outsider pressed, “you know, Daud... you’ve been thinking of them as your kids lately. You care about them more than you let on. Why not bring them with you?” 

  
“It’s not that easy. What should I do? Completely turn around and tell them everything I’ve given them is a curse? That it’ll kill them if they go down the same path I did?” 

  
“That’s up to you. It seems to me like that’s what you’d like to do.” 

  
“They’ll hate me.”

  
The Outsider laughed softly. “Of course they won’t. They all woke up from situations that they could very well have died in, and the first thing they do is to run to try and protect you. Your negligence could have killed them, had Corvo had worse intent for you, but regardless, they still care about you. I doubt hatred is something they have the capacity for. Not towards you, anyway. As much as you view them as your children, they view you as their father. At least.” 

  
“I’m not their father,” Daud said gruffly. 

  
“I’m not saying that you claimed you were. But you think of them as your own regardless.”

  
The Outsider leaned against Daud, who grimaced, and considered blowing smoke in the heretic god’s face, or burning him with the lit end. He did neither. 

  
“You have the means to rescue each and every one of them from the life you’ve put them into. Whether you do or not is up to you. How you go about it, if at all.” He drew away from him. “Good luck, Daud. They’re waiting for you.”

  
Daud blinked and the shadow of the void disappeared behind his eyelids. The darkness around him was softer this time, and far less sinister. Night had fallen. He moaned quietly when he sat up- blessedly, in his own bed and not still on the ground. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and he realized on the floor beside him was a small sea of whalers. Some of them looked like they were asleep, passed out with their heads on folded arms or on each other. Others chatted softly. Daud swore he could see a deck of cards between three of them. 

  
Daud lay back down, lest they notice the fact he’d woken up. Then they’d scatter, surely, afraid of invoking his wrath. A handful would stay behind and chew him out. But that could come later.   
For now, he was much too busy considering how he was going to get approximately sixty kids to Karnaca with him. He’d figure it out. 


End file.
